Probably too soon to ask, but I'm wondering if anyone could help with something. I'm new to the kindle/mobi world and am experiencing a bit of trouble with some missing covers. With some (not all) of my .mobi files, if I move them into the documents folder on the PW via USB cable manually, or have calibre do it, sometimes the covers of these books will be missing (replaced by a generic kindle cover it looks like). If I take the same file and send it to the kindle cloud storage and then tell amazon to send it to my PW it shows up with the cover, but with a white bar labelled "Personal" at the bottom of the book cover--which I can live with, but find a bit annoying.

(this is based on Kindle Touch, my PW won't be delivered until tomorrow, but they should be very similar)

The images you see don't come directly from the book file. They're to be found in /system/thumbnails. They're all 157 pixels wide (this might be more like 200 pixels on KPW because of the greater resolution). The height is proportional to the original cover image. I believe Kindle generates these on the fly from cover images found in the book file (or application).

But at least on Fire, cover images have to be of some magic dimensions before the thumbnails will generate and display. When you send things to personal document service metadata (and covers presumably) get 'sanitized' so these will always work. But when sideloaded, this sanitization doesn' t happen. So I'd check the cover dimensions calibre is using and compare ones that work with those that don't, and see if a pattern emerges (for example, if larger resolution images always fail). Or you might search the Fire forum here for the thread discussing the similar issue (I've just read about it, but haven't dealt with it directly myself).

Thank you, I will definitely go give that a try! On another note, I am guessing there is no way to remove the white "Personal" label that amazon places on the bottom of any personal document?

Thanks again-

I'd be surprised if there were, short of a hack. They probably think of this as a feature or convenience, not an annoyance. It is probably an overlay on top of the thumbnail, not in the thumbnail itself.

3) Convert ePub to Mobi in Calibre with sharing option I mentioned above turned on
Result: Mobi file that shows the books cover, tagged as personal

Same experience here (did 1 and 3). I decided to go with option 3. Note that this is also being discussed in the Calibre forum (go to 2nd page. First is a guy who is having problems that we did to have)

The technical explanation for this is that if a book's metadata contains an ASIN, the system will try to download the book cover from Amazon.

By default, calibre generates a fake ASIN (a GUID) and inserts it into the book's metadata. So the Kindle will say "Hey, I'll ask online for the cover", but the webservice obviously doesn't know the ID of the book.

Checking the facebook option in the calibre options prevents calibre from putting that fake ASIN in the book, so the cover is taken from the file, instead of searching for it online.

Spoiler:

This is probably exactly the same code as on the Kindle Touch, where it is fixed via an (unofficial) patch. See this post (and the following one) for more info.

PS: It will take some time, but with 99% confidence, JBPatch will eventually also support the Paperwhite.